Working Through My Steam Library

I feel like I've been writing about some pretty heavy stuff recently, so let's switch gears a little and talk about something more trivial.

I've been clearing some games off my Steam backlog recently. The ones that I have completed recently include DARQ, and A Short Hike. I've also tried the demo of Ageless. I've also started on The Mummy Demastered, and played some Amid Evil and Halo 2. I'll just talk a little about each of them today.

DARQ is a small indie puzzle that I learnt about from Reddit quite a while back. It features an interesting geometry for the environment, with rooms sometimes offering up to four different ways to traverse, with each surface acting as a walkable floor. The puzzles are not particularly hard, the art style has a strong Tim Burton feel to it, and the game is quite short. I didn't try to 100% it, just calling it a day after completing the main quest line. Would I recommend it? Hmm... to support a new indie developer, sure. But beware, it is a short game, and to be fair, some aspects of the strange geometry can cause a little motion sickness---might be easy to want to rage quit at that point.

A Short Hike is a colourful puzzle-lite uhh ``walking simulator'', though I'm not using that term in a derogatory way at all. I think that despite its simplicity, its main strong point is that of a game offering an uplifting experience, hence the colourful palette and cute [animal] characters with interesting dialogue that contain some rather straightforward quests. There is no combat, and items provide improvements to mobility. It's a fun game. I didn't 100% it either, but did complete the main storyline and some side quests. Would I recommend it? Sure... but more for the casual uplifting aspect than anything else. Dialogue is simple but fun, and will put a smile to anyone's face.

The Ageless demo I tried, I didn't like. The biggest issue I had was the control scheme with the controller---holding the RT button while trying to aim with the right control stick is very uncomfortable and finicky. I went through about ten to twenty screens before I couldn't stand it any more, and thus ended up deciding to not get the full game, despite it being the work of an indie developer. Not recommended by me.

I just started a bit of The Mummy Demastered, another metroidvania game, and find that it is somewhere between Hollow Knight and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It's still too early to tell, but the mechanics seem interesting, with eight-directional ranged combat as the main focus as compared to the mostly melee nature of Hollow Knight and the hybrid one that is Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Amid Evil is getting tougher now as I am in the last two of the seven episodes. It's starting to reach Serious Sam levels of enemies, and requires quite a bit of concentration. If I'm persistent, I'm likely to complete it by the end of this week.

Halo 2 is a Halo game. I've completed chapter 12/15, and it is definitely ramping up in the difficulty as the climax of the game is being reached. As a first-person shooter [that I play with mouse and keyboard], it definitely plays ``slower'' than Amid Evil and Doom 2016/Doom Eternal, and it shows. Because the Master Chief's reactions are at least three times slower than Doomguy, and it does take me a while to get back the right tempo. It'll be completed, and then I can work on the remaining 2 Halo games (Halo 3 and Halo 4) that are part of the Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Halo 3: ODST is a part of the collection, but is not really a part of the main storyline involving the Master Chief, so I'm happy to skip it. This is unlike Halo: Reach, which is a prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved that does not involve the Master Chief.

So that's that with respect to clearing out the backlog of games in my Steam library. I kinda miss the point-and-click type action RPGs, so I may get back into Grim Dawn again.

------

In other news, I am making slow and steady progress through the mental math drilling software that I talked about earlier. The core gameplay loop is done, and I have added ways to store the problem sets, responses, and associated metrics into data files that can be used for analysis/additional review later on. Soon it will be ready to for me to train myself.

Mwahahaha...

Anyway, that's all I have for now. Till the next update then.